Blood Revels of the Puppet Mistress

Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah (1995) ***1/2

This kooky kiddie relic of the pandemic cultural crappiness constituting the 1990s opens with sock-puppeteer Sonia Hurwitz (alias Shari Lewis) doing some last-minute Chanukah shopping in an open air produce market. Brimming with the supremacist ebullience of the season, Hurwitz launches into a song to tell her fellow shoppers how happy she is, dancing and twirling her red coattail like a vampire’s cape now that Chanukah, like some biblical plague, has finally arrived! She bumps into TV has-beens Pat Morita (Happy Days) and Alan Thicke (Growing Pains) and invites them to come to her house for dinner. That means it is up to Hurwitz and Lamb Chop to cook enough latkes (potato pancakes) to accommodate their guests – all while singing up a funky shitstorm about it, of course.

Meanwhile, Hurwitz’s mutant child, buck-toothed miniature pony Charlie Horse, is trying to win a prize by creating the greatest-ever superhero using a computer game. Thicke and Morita have dual roles as two of Charlie’s botched superhero creations, Weapons Man and Super Ninja, who proceed to tear up Hurwitz’s house like a couple of ungrateful goyische kops. Lloyd Bochner also appears as a disembodied flying head in an existential crisis. Camp factor, needless to say, is high.

Nothing captures the spirit of a Jewish holiday like a Jew with her fist stuffed up the ass of a symbol of Christ named after its own dismemberment. Christians, accustomed to celebrating the birth or resurrection of Jesus and seeing Jews constantly depicted as innocent victims in the massive ass media, are generally unaware that the Chosen, in choosing their holy days, prefer to commemorate the slaughter of gentile enemies and their children.

Chanukah, or Hanukkah, or however one attempts to express by means of the English alphabet the phlegm production signifying the name of this eight-day indulgence in ritual self-worship, celebrates the victory of Judah Maccabee, or “Judas Sledgehammer”, who defeated the gentile forces of the Greeks and the Syrians, two peoples against whom – if recent history offers any indication – the Jews still bear a bloodthirsty grudge.

3.5 out of 5 Stars of David. Lock yourself in this laughing-gas chamber and get exterminated with cuteness.

Shari’s Passover Surprise (1996) ***1/2

Charlie Horse is running for Fifth Grade President at his elementary school, which apparently is so progressive that disheveled Jewish ponies are permitted to enroll alongside human children. Hoping to sway his classmates’ loyalties by means of old country hospitality – and to subject them to weepy tales of Jewish woe to gain sympathy votes – Charlie invites the whole multicultural crew to the Hurwitz home for a Passover Seder. That means lots o’ matzo to make!

Gullible tub Dom DeLuise, tricked into believing himself the recipient of some enviable privilege, is persuaded to play the shabbos goy and cook supper for the bunch, and professes his eagerness to become a Seder “sadist”, while Benson‘s Robert Guillaume is also invited and sings some soulful jive about the plagues visited upon the Egyptians. Rounding out the likable cast of has-beens is Alan Thicke, putting in another brief appearance in the demanding role of himself.

The Seder is a kind of nightmarish house party, with characters crawling around looking for a hidden matzo and Lamb Chop hanging from a chandelier and screaming in vain for help from Shari. This being the 90s, when the children are told the story of the Egyptian captivity, they are told to boo when Pharaoh is mentioned and go “Woo Woo Woo!” like an Arsenio Hall audience whenever Moses gets name-dropped.

Passover occasions the Jews’ deluded gloating over their psychotic god Yahweh’s mass murder of gentile children in Egypt during the period of the Israelites’ supposed enslavement in that land. Notwithstanding the utter lack of archaeological evidence for this, however, Shari’s Passover Surprise goes whole hog and more than once trots out the ludicrous claim that Hebrew wretches were even forced to build the pyramids.

Continuing in the tradition of killing gentile children, Shari’s Passover Surprise cuts loose with a veritable enfilade of politically correct small ordnance, hitting the audience with a cheerful anti-slavery pep talk, multicultural mumbo jumbo, and even an endorsement of bestiality when Charlie Horse determines to ask a black girl out on a date – all designed to murder the mind and squash incipient self-esteem in any white children who may happen to be watching.

There is also a faint echo of Kristallnacht when Charlie Horse and a blond boy are playing catch outside Robert Guillaume’s house and break out one of his windows. The blond boy, naturally being a fink, runs away and leaves the horse to take the whole of the blame. Damn blond kids! It was a perfectly good and wholesomely diverse neighborhood until they moved in!

3.5 out of 5 Stars of David. Press play and get plagued, you hateful goyim!

“Come on, Bubby, light my fire!”

Snowflake the White Gorilla ***

Realized through a mixture of live action and computer-generated animation, this Spanish-produced film follows the fortunes of Snowflake, the world’s only albino gorilla, who as a child is taken by force from her parents in Spain’s colony of Equatorial Guinea and sold to a zoologist, who gives Snowflake to his daughter Wendy (Claudia Abate) as a pet. Wendy and Snowflake become bosom companions, but Snowflake’s life is again upturned when Wendy’s father deems her too old and troublesome to be kept as a pet and sends her to live instead in a zoo with other gorillas.

Unfortunately for Snowflake, the papa gorilla is prejudiced, takes an immediate disliking to her, and would rather his two children, Petunia and Elvis, had no association with her. Snowflake is understandably ashamed at being different, and sets out with friendly red panda Jenga to find the Witch of the North (Elsa Pataky), who can turn Snowflake into a normal, black gorilla so she can fit in with her peers. Meanwhile, the evil and superstitious Dr. Archibald Pepper (Pere Ponce) has designs on Snowflake’s heart, not in the emotional sense, but as an ingredient in a potion he hopes will give him eternal life.

Children will enjoy this simple story, the innocent Snowflake being an impossible heroine to dislike. The animation ranges from tolerable to excellent, and the jokes, of the “monkeying around” variety of wordplay, are hit-and-miss; but the film is sufficiently fast-paced to keep both young and old from falling asleep. Voice-over actors in the English-dubbed version include Christopher Lloyd as the goofy Dr. Pepper, David Spade as zen-aspiring red panda Jenga, and Keith David as the father gorilla. Surprisingly, the English version even includes an allusion to David’s role in John Carpenter’s alien invasion classic They Live, when, aping (no pun intended) Roddy Piper’s character in that film, he says, “I do two things: eat bananas and kick butt. Looks like we’re almost out of bananas.”

Jenga sums up the movie’s lesson when he says, “At the end of the day, being yourself always means being a little different.” In addition to the prevailing messages of tolerance and self-esteem, young audiences are also reminded of stranger danger and of the value of family. Mildly gross humor includes nose-picking, with cartoonish violence fairly frequent. Potentially objectionable moments include Dr. Pepper chasing Snowflake with an axe and brandishing a machete as he threatens the beautiful Witch of the North, “You won’t be pretty when I’m done with you.” Mothers may also want to be aware of one borderline raunchy scene in which Jenga, understandably eyeing the Witch’s shapely rump, observes, “Ooh, you know I might be missing out on some stuff with all this purification.”

3 of 5 possible stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Snowflake the White Gorilla is:

11. Class-conscious. Dr. Pepper, though wealthy, is a miserly tipper.

10. Media-critical. Media reliability is implicitly questioned when a news broadcast about Snowflake erroneously uses footage of Petunia instead.

9. Pro-police. Cops, after catching Pepper, flash peace signs.

8. Secularist/skeptical. Reason is more valuable than superstition or new age spiritual notions of karma and meditation, Jenga’s jargon stock-in-trade.

7. Animal rights militant. Hunters, ivory collectors, and other victimizers of animals are depicted negatively.

6. Anti-colonial. Just as progressivist wisdom dictates that the Third World must liberate itself from its western masters (even when, as in the case of Equatorial Guinea, this invariably results in terror, tyranny, and a degraded standard of living), it is part of Snowflake’s coming of age that she separates from her adoptive family of humans and self-actualizes among her own kind. (To the extent that the representative of the colonized country is an animal, the film is perhaps unintentionally racist.)

5. Multiculturalist/pro-wigger. Jenga, making the racial subtext of the film explicit, says, “She wants to be black, you moron. It’s actually not uncommon in teenagers.” Snowflake and friends, during the end festivities, do a negroid dance to kiddie hip-hop. Jenga sassily calls Snowflake “girlfriend”.

4. Mildly feminist. Snowflake is tough and adventurous. Wendy’s mother, though the typical homemaker of Franco’s traditionalist Spain, perhaps hints at the advantages of sexual equality and women in the workplace when she observes, “It’s not easy living off of one income.”

3. Arguably irreligious, specifically constituting a coded attack on Catholicism. Dr. Pepper derives his outmoded superstitions from an ancient Latin text full of arcane lore and prescriptions, and his devotions include the lighting of candles on an altar. His beliefs and his yearning for eternal life are psychologically unhealthy “childhood hangups”, the viewer is told. Jenga mocks him and possibly alludes to Jehovah’s Witnesses when he says, “Shouldn’t you be going door to door telling people about your weird obsession?” The Witch of the North, looking into Dr. Pepper’s favorite book and seeing what it has to say on the subject of white gorillas, objects, “Oh, my God, that must be a mistake.” Religion, Snowflake the White Gorilla teaches, must be bent to accord with social progress. Subversively, the Witch is the more likable character.

2. Pro-family. Families, though not perfect, are generally useful and loving units. Wendy, thinking she might die, reflects, “I should have been nicer to my parents.”

1. Pro-miscegenation and anti-racist (i.e., pro-yawn). The film ends with a white gorilla/black gorilla kiss. A red panda may also have the hots for a human.

Doggie B *1/2

Pat Buchanan has said, “If you want to see what the future of America is going to look like, I think you ought to look at California.”  San Francisco – or, as Michael Savage would have it, San Fransicko – is one of the most progressive cities in the Golden State; and if the cinematic acid trip Doggie B, aka Doggie Boogie: Get Your Grrr On!, serves as any kind of mental health forecast for the country as a whole, then these Disunited States are definitely nightmare-bound.

Doggie B introduces children to Peter Wolfe (Scott Cox), a gay San Francisco man who, apparently having despaired of finding love in the AIDS capital of California, has devoted his life to dancing with dogs, even going so far as to make it his life’s calling and dancing with his dog professionally in competitions with other dog dance teams.  His dream of interspecies Astaire-and-Rogers-dom is cruelly dashed to pieces when evil competitor Gertrude Spinner (Bettina Devin) causes him to have an accident with his dog, which drives Peter into a downward spiral of junk food obsession and gloom.  Fortunately for everyone (excepting the viewer, that is), his niece Cassie Barbizon (Jesse Draper) has a more optimistic outlook and hopes to pick up where her uncle left off, with puppy Pijo as her partner.  Complicating her blueprint for self-actualization is Cassie’s mother, ambulance-chasing attorney Karen Barbizon (Barbara Tintori), who expects her daughter to follow in her footsteps by studying law.

Doggie B plays a bit like a Rick Sloane film sans the nasty humor (minus the good parts, in other words), with Gertrude recalling cartoonish villainesses Queen Bee and Malathion from auteur Sloane’s Vice Academy series. That a film about dog dancing proves to be less than spectacular can hardly come as any surprise, but the autistic canines in Doggie B have little to do and evince an unusually low level of animal charisma.

Doggie B does, however, have two major strengths in its favor. The first is its amazing visual flair, with no inch of footage escaping without generous splashes of color and zaniness, whether in the art direction or the actresses’ coifs and costumes that at times make the film appear to be peopled entirely by auxiliary members of the B-52s.  The second thing this film has going for it is its cast of colorful, perky character actresses.  Men hoodwinked into renting Doggie B for their children can be consoled at least that, while they are certainly in for a long and grueling haul, there are several attractive actresses in the film, with tall, shapely Jesse Draper quite the knockout, other kooky San Francisco ditzes looking very edible, and scary Bettina Devin perhaps appealing to fetishists of the mature.

A star and a half.  Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Doggie B is:

9. Anti-Christian.  This film’s good book is the “Dog Dance Bible”.

8. Anti-drug.  Gertrude has secretly been injecting her dance partner with “doggeroids” from a glowing green Re-Animator syringe.  Though there appear to be no adverse effects for the dog, the doggeroids, it turns out, are extremely damaging to a woman’s complexion.

7. Multiculturalist/pro-immigration.  A nice Caribbean (?) doctor introduces Cassie to holistic dog therapy after an old white doctor proves ineffective at treating Pijo’s malaise.

6. Pro-gay.  Though his orientation is never made explicit, Peter’s choice of costumes (beginning with the sweater tied around his shoulders and ending with his climactic John Travolta leisure suit) and make-up for his performances leave little room for doubt.  He wipes his mouth in disgust after a cute fag hag plants a big juicy one on him.  The whole film is a fabulous high camp fever dream.

5. Racist!  Doggie B perpetuates the Magical Negro stereotype with a kinky-afroed black yogi-priestess who can communicate with dogs.  Jews are mercenary, neurotic, and cynical, with personal injury chiseler Karen getting excited at hearing about a terrible car pile-up.  Her practice’s slogan is, “Get hit, get rich quick.”

4. Pro-miscegenation, breaking down prejudiced species barriers.  Doggie B blazes trails by proving that canines are suitable dance partners for Jews.

3. Individualist.  “Mom, this is not about you,” Cassie tells her mother prefatory to her intention of going for the gold with Pijo.  “Believe it or not, I’m growing up.  I’ve changed.  I’m creating my perfect life.”

2. Pro-family.  Despite disagreements, relatives maintain ties, share affection, and help each other.  Parents concerned about adult content are, however, alerted to the off-color inclusion of a sexual slap on the butt.  Also, Cassie’s love interest Roman (Patrick Alan Davis) says to her at one point, “You look hot – I mean, it’ll stand out on the dance floor” [italics added].

1. New Age.  “This stuff really works!” Cassie exults after taking Pijo to Shangrrrla, a clinic for dogs where their spirituality finds alignment.  At Shangrrrla, too, the viewer learns that, “In rare cases, when our souls are wounded, certain quite special dogs become spiritual healers.”  Peter wears an ankh during his climactic routine, which begins with his emergence from a giant disco ball in the shape of a dog’s head, the lowering of which occasions a kind of religious experience in the crowd.  San Francisco’s hippie drum beaters also put in a cameo.